DaveYostCom wrote: I followed instructions I read somewhere, and as I recall it was a whole lot easier than what you did.
Now I can't for the life of me find those instructions. :-/
Yeah, so what's your point! 
The OP had a special situation, a triple boot MBP with rEFIt as the Boot Manager and VMware Fusion probably didn't recognize it. Anyway, over the years I've created Virtual Machines just about every way that can be done, officially and unofficially, and sometimes one needs to do whatever it is takes to accomplish the task at hand. Some versions of VMware Fusion will automatically recognize an external hard drive with a Windows install and treat it as though it's Boot Camp, even though technically it's not, and offer to run it as a Virtual Machine and automatically process it just as if it was a Boot Camp install. I do not know if VMware Fusion 5 will do that and I'm not in a place I can test at the moment.
Anyway if you have an issue or question then you need to expound on what you've said as I don't see a question in your post.
Message was edited by: WoodyZ - Originally posted, Mar 5, 2013 4:39 PM.